FreeDOS 1.0
3 Sept 2006 Yes, the FreeDOS Project has reached the "1.0"
milestone. This is a very important day for FreeDOS. A lot of you have
put in so much work over the years, helping to make everything
perfect. I want to send out my thanks to everyone who has worked on
the FreeDOS Project, to help bring us to the "1.0" release. That
includes both current members and past members. There are too many of
you to name. Even if you didn't contribute code, you helped out the
FreeDOS Project by submitting comments and bug reports.
This release would not have happened if it were not for the efforts of
lots of contributors who believed in a little free software project
that was quietly announced to the world in 1994.
When I began the FreeDOS Project in 1994, my computer experience was
fairly limited. As a physics student at the University of
Wisconsin-River Falls, I wrote simple programs to analyze lab data,
and of course I used a computer to write papers and do further lab
analysis. My primary computing platform back then was MS-DOS, running
on a '386. I really enjoyed using DOS. The operating system was easy
to use, ran well on my little '386 with only 2MB memory, and was rock
solid.
I ran everything from DOS: word processing, spreadsheets, connections
to the university dialup network, data analysis, lab simulations, and
computer programming. Along the line, I picked up an 8088 laptop so I
could do computer work when I was away from my desktop. The only
operating system that would run on my 8088 was DOS, but I would have
used it anyway. As far as I was concerned, DOS was a great operating
system.
So it was a shock to me in 1994, when Microsoft announced it was going
to stop supporting MS-DOS in favor of a new version of Windows. This
was about a year before Windows 95 hit the shelves. Microsoft, it
seemed, had abandoned its DOS roots! And I wasn't the only one who was
surprised. A lot of people on the DOS newsgroups that I subscribed to
were complaining about being forced to a platform they didn't find
very easy to use.
Quickly, people asked for alternatives. Would there ever be a "free"
DOS, ala Linux? If the Linux hacker community had succeeded in writing
their own UNIX system, then surely it couldn't be that hard to write a
free version of DOS. I wrote a few utilities myself, some basic
utilities, just to get the easy ones out of the way. After I'd written
over a dozen utilities that replaced MS-DOS commands, and found some
public domain source that implemented other functionality, I realized
that you could reproduce what MS-DOS does and make it a free software
project. So I decided to go for it.
PD-DOS was announced to the world on June 28, 1994. By July 24, 1994,
the name of the project had officially changed to "Free-DOS", and
later just "FreeDOS".
It immediately became a popular idea. Within a few weeks, I had
several coders from various parts who contacted me, wanted to take on
this or that part of the new FreeDOS. Weeks after that, the number had
doubled. People started writing code, and Tim Norman created a
COMMAND.COM replacement, which is the heart of the DOS command line I
was contacted by Pat Villani, who had already written a functional DOS
kernel called DOS/NT, and who was willing to release it under the GNU
GPL for us to use! I think the fact that, early on, we had access to a
working DOS kernel, COMMAND.COM, and a set of basic command line
utilities really helped get the FreeDOS project in motion.
Finally, on 3 Sept 2006, FreeDOS "1.0" was released.
We've had some bumps along the way. It's taken a long time to get to
our "1.0" debut, but I think that's because everyone wanted this to be
a really good release. In the last 12 years, we've not only created a
DOS-compatible operating system, we've extended what you can do with
DOS. The FreeDOS of 2006 is much more capable than the MS-DOS of
1994. A short list of things possible with FreeDOS today:
* Easy multiboot with Win95-2003 and NT/XP/ME
* FAT32 file system and large disk support (LBA)
* LFN support (with several tools, and FreeCOM (COMMAND.COM).)
* LBACACHE - disk cache (harddisks in CHS and LBA mode, diskette)
* Memory Managers: HIMEM, EMM386, UMBPCI
* SHSUCDX (MSCDEX replacement) and CD-ROM driver (XCDROM)
* CUTEMOUSE - Mouse driver with scroll wheel support
* FDAPM - APM info/control/suspend/poweroff, ACPI throttle, HLT
energy saving...
* XDMA - UDMA driver for DOS: up to 4 harddisks
* MPXPLAY - media player for mp3, ogg, wmv... with built-in AC97
and SB16 drivers
* 7ZIP, INFO-ZIP zip and unzip... - modern archivers are available
for DOS
* EDIT / SETEDIT - multi window text editors
* HTMLHELP - help viewer, can read help directly from a zip file
* PG - powerful text viewer (similar to V. D. Buerg's LIST)
* many text mode programs ported from Linux thanks to DJGPP
* GRAPHICS - greyscale hardcopy on ESC/P, HP PCL and PostScript
printers
* etc.
We've come a long way. I love the FreeDOS that we have today. For me,
it was definitely worth the wait.
But the future is always changing. Who can tell where things will be
in three to five years? The key to FreeDOS remaining a popular system
in years to come is for us to remain true to our original goals: to
create a free version of DOS, with source available to all, so that
people may take the software in new directions.
-jhall